Western Ukraine under Poland and the Soviet myth

The myth

Soviet propaganda — and its present-day reprises — claims that in the 1930s the Ukrainian population of Western Ukraine, which then belonged to Poland, had limited rights and envied their compatriots on the Soviet side of the border. The Soviet Union, the story goes, gave Ukrainians greater opportunities than “lordly” Poland^[1].

A concrete example cited by proponents of this narrative: a young Ukrainian in Poland supposedly had no social mobility, whereas in the USSR a young man of the same kind could climb the social ladder — becoming a “Red commander” or a collective-farm chairman.

Social mobility: the facts against the narrative

The first question that dismantles this thesis: envy of what, exactly? The collective-farm system? In interwar Poland, private ownership of land was preserved, whereas in the Soviet Union collectivization was under way, with its dekulakization and the Holodomor^[2].

The argument about a lack of career prospects is refuted by a single fact: a Ukrainian served as deputy marshal of the Polish Sejm — the deputy head of parliament^[3]. This was Vasyl Mudryi (1893–1966), head of the Ukrainian National Democratic Alliance (UNDO), elected deputy marshal of the Sejm in 1935 and reelected after the 1938 elections. This is a perfectly respectable rung on the career ladder — unattainable, incidentally, for any Ukrainian under the Soviet one-party system.

Equally false is the claim about the absence of Ukrainian education. In Poland there were Ukrainian schools, bilingual schools, and Polish schools — as in any civilized state of the time^[4]. The number of Ukrainian schools did indeed shrink under pressure from the Polish authorities in the late 1930s, but the system of national education itself functioned. In Poland of that era (as in the USSR), one could fail to get an education only through a lack of willingness or by living on a remote homestead with no access to a school.

That is why all these arguments, as the author of the video debate bluntly puts it, are “sucked out of thin air”^[5].

”Stalin was delaying the war”

Adjacent to this narrative is another myth — that an advantageous German loan allowed Stalin to “delay” the start of the war and prepare better. This inverts the causal relationship. The fact that both Hitler was preparing to attack Stalin and Stalin was preparing to attack Hitler is a commonplace among all historians who study World War II seriously. Stalin was not delaying the war — he was bringing it closer^[6].

Why it works as propaganda

At the heart of all these assertions is a fixed scheme of the Soviet narrative: the Soviet Union is portrayed as the center of good, while the notional West, including Poland, is the center of evil. Any arguments, not grounded in sources, are fitted to this scheme^[7].

Understanding this mechanism matters not only for assessing the past: the same binary lens of “USSR/Russia = good, the West = evil” lies at the foundation of contemporary Kremlin propaganda about Ukraine.